Healthy Eating

The National Prevention Strategy provides evidence-based Recommendations for Healthy Eating. The Strategy also identifies actions that partners including governments, businesses, health care systems, schools, community organizations and individuals can take to implement these recommendations across multiple settings. The resources in this toolkit are intended to help state and territorial governments and their partners implement the Strategy through the suggested actions below:

Ensure that foods served or sold in government facilities and government-funded programs and institutions (e.g., schools, prisons, juvenile correctional facilities) meet nutrition standards consistent with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Strengthen licensing standards for early learning centers to include nutritional requirements for foods and beverages served.

Work with hospitals, early learning centers, health care providers, and community-based organizations to implement breastfeeding policies and programs.

Ensure laboratories, businesses, health care, and community partners are prepared to respond to outbreaks of foodborne disease.

Use grants, zoning regulations, and other incentives to attract full-service grocery stores, supermarkets, and farmers markets to underserved neighborhoods, and use zoning codes and disincentives to discourage a disproportionately high availability of unhealthy foods, especially around schools.

Community Commons Interactive Mapping ToolThis is an interactive mapping, networking and learning tool.
States can explore data sets (such as access to food retailers) and use them to
make dynamic, multi-layer maps for your state, county, city, or neighborhood.
Community Commons also has public groups that offer topic-specific
resources.

Economic Research Service Food Environment AtlasThe USDA’s Atlas assembles statistics on three broad categories of
food environment factors— food choices, health and well-being, and community
characteristics. States can use the Atlas to create maps showing the variation
in a single indicator across the U.S. or view county-level
indicators.

MenuStat Nutrition Information ToolThe New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s MenuStat is a public database of 35,000 restaurant foods and beverages from 66 of the top U.S. restaurant chains. MenuStat allows users to analyze nutrition trends across restaurants, food categories, and over time. Users can search items, use a graphing function, and export data.

Community GuideThe Guide to Community
Preventive Services (The Community Guide) is the place to find evidence-based
recommendations and findings covering many health topics and types of
interventions for behavior change, disease prevention and environmental
change.

Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) 2010The DGA provide authoritative advice about making informed food
choices and being physically active to promote overall health. States can use
them to ensure that foods served or sold in government-funded programs and
institutions meet nutrition standards consistent with these
Guidelines.

Healthy People 2020Healthy People
offers science-based, 10-year national objectives for improving the health of
all Americans, and provides measurable objectives and goals to help states
engage multiple sectors to take actions to strengthen policies and improve
practices that are driven by the best available evidence and
knowledge.

Surgeon General's Call to Action to Support
BreastfeedingThe Surgeon General has identified 20
key actions that families, communities, employers and healthcare professionals
can use to improve support for breastfeeding. States can use this to work with
multiple sectors to implement breastfeeding policies and
programs.

Surgeon General's Vision for a Healthy and Fit
NationLike the NPS, this document identifies
opportunities for interventions to prevent obesity in multiple settings: home,
child care, school, work place, health care, and community. The Surgeon General
has identified key actions to promote health and fitness in all of these
settings.

Fit, Healthy and Ready to Learn School Health Policy
GuidesChapter E in the National Association of State
Boards of Education’s (NASBE) Fit, Healthy, and Ready to Learn series
of school health policy guides focuses on healthy eating. This is a valuable
resource for state leaders to ensure that education policies support healthy
school environments.

Healthy Concessions GuideNemours’
guide helps states make concession products healthier by providing
recommendations and sample policies to use to support changing work
environments. It also provides guidelines for beverages, fruits and vegetables,
milk products, meats, and grains and breads.

Restaurant Performance StandardsIn March 2012, the RAND Corporation pulled together a group of experts to develop guidelines for healthier adult and children’s restaurant meals. The restaurant performance standards, released in the fall of 2013, include a set of healthier restaurant practices and recommendations for calories, fats, sugars, and sodium, and servings of vegetables, fruit, and whole grains.

healthfinder.govhealthfinder.gov provides easy-to-understand, actionable information on prevention and wellness topics that state health agencies can use to promote healthy living in their communities, organized around evidence-based actions that individuals can take to stay healthy. The Health Topics A-Z allows users to browse by category, population, or topic for tools and resources for maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Healthy Meeting ToolkitThe Healthy Meeting Toolkit, developed by members of the National Alliance for Nutrition and Activity (NANA), includes guidance on key components of a healthy meeting and resources to help make hosting healthy meetings easier.

Chronic Disease State Policy Tracking SystemCDC’s state-based searchable database contains information on
nutrition, physical activity, and obesity data. It provides abstracts and
status updates for state legislation and agency regulations. States can use
this database to find language for drafting laws.

Nutrition Standards for Early Care and EducationDelaware’s regulation 67.0 is an example of early care and
education nutrition standards that can protect and promote the healthy, safety,
well-being, and positive development of children who receive services in early
care and education and school-age centers.